


United States of Irreversible Oblivion

by just_a_dram



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, F/M, Gun Violence, POV Multiple, Prostitution, Sexual Content, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 09:57:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5000395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/pseuds/just_a_dram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the government losing its fight at the northern border, Sansa's only hope is that one of its soldiers, Office Jon Snow, will return for her and save her from the horrors of a collapsing society.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Lovely edits have been made for this series by two very talented ladies: aureliacamargo and alice-in-neverneverland. They can be found under my [usoio tag](http://justadram.tumblr.com/tagged/usoio) on tumblr. This series wouldn't be what it is without their contributions.

Sansa stirs before a gloved hand ever shakes her shoulder, the heavy steel toed footsteps of the soldiers echoing on the old gym’s pine floor loudly enough to bring her out of her uneasy slumber. There’s never true quiet in the Vale Elementary gym, where she’s been sleeping on a cot within arm’s reach of her neighbor for the past two weeks, but tonight’s disturbance is beyond the normal sounds of two hundred women restlessly tossing on creaking cots.

Blinking in the darkness–they won’t spare even one candle for the refugees gathered here–she can make out the silhouettes of the women, whose cots sit closest to the exit, being herded out the door single file. Before he was called away on assignment to the capital, Jon secured her a spot closer to the middle of the room. It’s a desirable location. The wind doesn’t blow so sharp here from the cracked windows along the northern cinder block wall, where the basketball hoops hang suspended, never to be lowered again to the accompanying sounds of children’s squeals. It was a parting kindness, and she’s thanked him for it every night after she said her prayers, praying for her lost parents and siblings.

_Arya might be alive._

No. They’re all dead. It’s better that way.

She sits up, pulling the wool blanket full of moth holes around her shoulders, as she watches the soldiers move row by row, shaking awake the women who sleep more soundly than the rest. The men point gloved fingers and shiny batons towards the exit, they pull blankets from the thin arms of women, and they shove, when feet are slow to respond.

We’re being moved, she realizes, as they finish emptying out the third row. Panic courses through her. Hands shaking, her blanket slips free of her grip, falling from one shoulder, as a tall, blond haired soldier pushes past a huddled group of women and makes for her row.

The process of moving them out isn’t taking long, as there are no belongings to gather up. Anything brought into the shelter by the refugees was stripped from the women by the soldiers conducting registration to feather their own nests. Any moment and she’ll be taken to some unknown destination.

Or they’re taking them outside to shoot them. It’s entirely possible. Less mouths to feed with winter closing in on them.

The thought is strangely comforting, and she’s on her feet, ready to face her fate by the time the heavily muscled soldier stands at the corner of her cot and jerks his thumb towards the door.

_Stay put. I’ll come back for you._

His last words to her whispered against her ear come back to her and urge her to speak up, though her voice is little more than a raspy whisper. “I’m supposed to wait here.”

“Plans change,” the soldier says with a stiff push that turns her towards the exit.

She would fight back, but they all carry guns, and while she doesn’t think he’d kill her without a direct order from a superior officer, she knows they think nothing of cracking you in the head with their weapons. She can’t risk a concussion. An injury in this world can mean the difference between life and death.

“He’ll find me,” she says under her breath over and over until the words run together in an unintelligible rush, as she’s pushed into line and follows, shuffling along behind the girl that slept at her back for the past five days.

When they stop short before the exit, some hesitation in the group in front of them halting their movement, Sansa stumbles, nearly knocking the slight framed girl right to the ground. Sansa never asked, but she can’t imagine she’s more than fifteen. The swelling under her sundress shows that her age didn’t mean anything to some soldier.

It had to be a soldier. All male citizens of age and able bodied were drafted, and though they live in warehouses turned into military housing, they’re the only ones with access to women. The government sent all remaining civilian men to their own refugee shelters months ago, breaking up families and leaving women young and old unprotected. There are rumors that there are no male shelters, just forced labor camps, and Sansa wonders if that’s where they’re headed.

It wasn’t so long ago that Sansa thought the girls who caught the eye of some soldier didn’t have it so bad. Sometimes the soldiers pooled their resources and put their girls in a trailer together, which kept them out of the shelters. It wasn’t an option Sansa ever entertained, because she still had the broken down Coachman RV unintentionally left to her by Aunt Lysa. Most people didn’t have it so good once the government took over the banks and terminated all mortgages and suspended loans. The banking amendment forced most people into the newly formed government refugee shelters, but Sansa owned her little home outright.

Sansa joined them a couple of weeks ago, when the government outlawed private civilian abodes. It would be easier to care for the people once they were all collected together. They promised them a safer world. One without the burden of freedom.

The new legislation made Sansa reconsider those cramped trailers. It wasn’t ideal, living with four or five girls, but there would still be some measure of independence, some camaraderie, and no men with guns standing guard at the door. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. She had a soldier. She had Jon.

When he first showed up outside her RV, wearing black, she’d been afraid. She didn’t trust soldiers, didn’t trust men, and she hadn’t seen him in almost a decade, but it was Robb’s childhood friend and she let him inside, hoping he was as harmless as she remembered him being.

_Those places are no better than brothels, Sansa. They pass the girls around._

If the girls get pregnant, they toss them out, shunting them off to a refugee shelter. That’s what happened to Sansa’s frail neighbor. Before, Sansa had been too busy trying to survive to fully realize the extent of the misery of others, but now her eyes are fully open. She’s too close to it not to see.

They don’t miss how the girl’s shoulders, bare to the cold air, shiver, as they walk out under the night’s field of stars towards several beat up looking school buses with numbers spray painted in red on the side. A pregnant girl shouldn’t be out in this weather in an old cotton dress, but whoever dumped her here must not have cared enough to dress her for winter.

Jon gave Sansa what he could, when he left. He gave her the clothes right off his back.

“Here,” Sansa says, pulling the black men’s sweater over her head before a soldier spots what she’s doing and puts a stop to it. Kindnesses are not encouraged. It’s easier to control people, when everyone is more likely to turn in their neighbors for some minor infraction rather than lend them a hand. “Hurry. Put it on,” she says, pushing the wadded up sweater into the girl’s ruddy, cracked hands.

Whatever becomes of her, Sansa doesn’t know. They separate them out according to some unknown system, two to the left, three to the right, and Sansa finds herself directed into bus seven, her pregnant neighbor into number three. The soldier standing before bus seven’s door squints down at her, as she steps forward. It’s the first man to meet her eye, since she was forced from her cot. Most of the soldiers treat them as if they’re not quite human, not worth a second glance. This might be her last shot to convince someone that she shouldn’t be moved.

“I’m not supposed to leave this shelter. I’m Officer Snow’s.”

Jon is well known in this quadrant and his name draws a frown from the man, who probably fears he’ll earn a demerit for incorrectly handling an officer’s girl if she speaks the truth. Uncrossing his arms, he grabs for Sansa’s right wrist. He snatches at the heavy knit of her shirt and pushes her sleeve up. He’s looking for a tattoo on the tender skin on the underside of her arm, a small string of numbers, Snow’s military service number inked in black to identify her as his. Some of the girls have rows of numbers up their arms, old ones marked through and fresh inked above.

Her arm is blank. She used to be proud of that fact. She used to think she was better than the others.

The back of his hand cracks her across the face. Sharp, too quick to dodge, and she feels the sting of blood in her lower lip split by his ring. They’re married to the job. Married to the military. Marked by hard, stainless rings worn on the same finger that in another time might have boasted a wedding band of platinum or gold.

“Nice try, sweetheart.”


	2. Chapter 2

It’s hard to keep track of time, as one fallow, frozen field after another rolls past the bus window, but it feels like hours before they come to a stop. The drive probably wasn’t long enough to have left their quadrant, but it’s further than Sansa’s been since the fuel crisis, when their access to foreign oil and the Alaskan pipeline was severed. This kind of travel is only available to government employees and military convoys. Shame she couldn’t enjoy the luxury of it.

They traveled south. Thick grey clouds block the sun from view and Sansa’s sense of direction has never been great, but the air isn’t as cold, when Sansa steps down onto the pockmarked pavement. They might have gained a few degrees, but it’s still cold enough that she misses Jon’s military issue black sweater. Even if it didn’t smell like him anymore, it was the only piece of him she had.

Hopefully it keeps that girl from freezing to death wherever her bus was headed. She isn’t here. Bus seven is the sole school bus outside the fenced compound parked alongside a row of military Jeeps and SUVs with the windows blacked out. She looks up at the razor wire curling around the tops of the chain link, as a soldier unlocks the narrow gate through which they will be ushered. There are towers at each corner of the fence line. They’re like the ones they used to have in national parks, except she knows that these are used to observe prisoners. She’s about to go from refugee to inmate. Which makes the soldier, who puts his hand on her shoulder as she reaches the gate, a prison guard.

Jon’s not guarding hungry women, who have committed no crime. As much as Jon hates what the government has become and the uniform he wears, Jon is needed where the fighting is heaviest. His assignment in her sector couldn’t last with the nation under fire. Based on previous performance on the front line, he was hand selected by the top brass to help plan the counterattack against the United World Resources’ forces to the north.

The UWR seized Canada and have been pushing south, encroaching into quadrants A and B for the last eighteen months. At first you could watch it play out online in video after brutal video posted to YouTube, but then the government nationalized all forms of digital communication. Compliance required the surrendering of civilian electronic devices at government collection points. It was the first of a seemingly endless string of suspended liberties deemed necessary for national security.

 _A safer tomorrow_.

“I promise that you’ll be safe here.”

“Excuse me,” Sansa says, as it dawns on her that her feet have frozen in place, refusing to take another step towards the plastic shed set up inside the fence.

They used to sell them at Home Depot. People put them behind their houses, filling them with lawn tools, discarded pots, and kinked hoses. Before the government outlawed private living spaces, people took to living in them. Now it’s a prison office, and the soldier at her elbow wants her to line up outside its plastic door. Why he took the time to assure her and didn’t just give her a good solid shove in the right direction, she isn’t sure, and she turns to really look at him.

He’s sloppy. Most officers would strike a man for allowing his uniform to come untucked from his pants or leave his hair uncombed. Not Jon. Maybe whoever runs this camp is kind like Jon. Maybe that’s why this soldier has shown her a little kindness. Or maybe she’s arrived someplace where nobody cares about anything anymore.

Like all soldiers, he has a number on his chest in place of a name. Unless you’re an officer, you’re not supposed to go by anything but that number. It’s another way to accustom them to not being fully human, so they can perpetrate inhumane acts if necessary.

“Dontos,” he whispers. He must have caught her looking at his SN. “Just between you and me,” he adds, pointing her towards the line that only lengthens as she stalls.

It’s only the finality of the sound of the gate being dragged over the pavement and catching on the loose bits of gravel as it closes that makes her stumble forward. She takes her place behind a woman whose body shakes with what are either hiccups or a messy case of tears. Sansa could give in to tears too. It’s a reasonable response to what feels like a death sentence. Tears pool in the corners of her eyes, waiting to fall, but showing weakness is as dangerous as a gaping wound. She’ll save her tears for the pillow.

It doesn’t take long for her to be processed through the makeshift office and released into the wider camp area to see that there will be no pillow. Beyond the smaller, paved enclosure that houses the soldiers’ offices stretches nothing but an open space that once must have been covered in grass. It’s nothing more than a muddy field now. Cropping up out of the mud like cancerous growths are haphazard shelters pieced together from cardboard boxes, Red Cross parachute drops, plastic shipping materials, and stretched out blankets all splattered with the same grey mud that spreads to her left and right.

Clutching the plastic pack of toiletries she was handed at registration, she watches as a man with one leg hobbles on a crutch out of the closest shelter. He adjusts his crutch and looks up at the crowd of newly arrived women before swinging around their way. He’s got the typical military haircut and uniform pants, the one leg tied off where his leg ends, which should mark him as a soldier, but the government doesn’t bother patching soldiers back up. He must have lost his leg in the fighting to the north, ending his service and starting his time here, because it’s obvious he’s as much a prisoner as they are, when he gets close enough to greet them with a bright white smile.

“You’ll want to keep hold of those toiletry kits, ladies. They’re a precious commodity around here.”

He scans the group as if looking for something, and when his sharp eyes skate over her, it feels like he’s stripped her down to her plain cotton underwear.

Until the UWR breach this sector, men are the biggest threat to women. Maybe that’s always been the way of it, but it became painfully clear to Sansa about a year ago. She had to learn to make herself invisible long before Jon took it into his head to search the registration database for any sign of the Stark family and failing to find any living person in it besides her, secure assignment in her sector.

_I was worried about you._

That’s all he said that first day outside her RV. In times like this, he was right to worry. Given her current circumstances, he’d probably abandon his assignment to get back to her, but there’s no way to get a message to him that she’s not in the shelter anymore. She’s someplace much worse.

There are men here. Not just soldiers, but civilians too. The very young, the very old, and those whom the government has rejected as not fit to serve. The soldiers who peer down from their watchtowers aren’t here to protect them from the men inside the fence. They’ve lumped them all together without a care for the women’s safety.

Those short months with Jon were the only time she ever felt safe. At first she was as afraid of him as she was every other officer with a gun at their hip. But Jon always slid his weapon out of its holster and left it by the door, when he came to visit her, always sat at a respectable distance from her on the RV’s bench seating, and always thanked her for the cloudy water she gave him. They talked about the past or sat together in silence, fighting loneliness together. He promised her he was still searching for Arya, who didn’t turn up in any of the registries. He brought her military rations and refused to share them with her, though she knew they were his own.

There was no reason to be afraid of Jon. He was the only good thing left in a world gone bad. He didn’t take anything from her that she didn’t offer, and when she finally offered herself, all he took was a kiss. When she closes her eyes and tests the split in her lip that won’t stop oozing, she swears she can taste him and not the coppery tang of blood.

“Red, what’s your name?” the man asks, pulling her from the heated memory of Jon’s arms around her and his body flush against her chest.

Sansa raises her toiletry pack up, holding it close to her middle. “Me?”

He raises his brows in anticipation of an answer. She considers lying and giving a false one, but something about the way he leans towards her as if pulled with anticipation tells her he already knows. Speaking it aloud is a mere formality.

“Sansa.”

“Sansa, sweetheart. You’re safe now. I’ve been waiting for you.”


	3. Chapter 3

From the state of the camp, it’s obvious that the government either can’t or won’t take the necessary steps to keep them alive, leaving survival up to the camp prisoners. An ugly system of exchanges has sprung up and at the heart of it are the shelters people have managed to put together with what little comes into the camp. Sansa’s brothers built pillow forts that were more livable than the hovels inside Camp 7B, but securing a space inside one of them is the only way to survive cold nights with all your digits intact.

Petyr made promises to help new girls. He would see to it that they got acclimated and found a place to sleep. Sansa squirms to think what they do to secure that help. The system hides in his carefully worded advice. Don’t be late for ration handouts, which fall at eight and nineteen hundred hours, because the pushing gets bad as they inevitably run low. When the crackly camp director voice comes over the loudspeakers to tell you to gather at the front enclosure, do it. Quickly. Clean yourselves up everyday as best you can with a portion of your water rations. Above all, don’t make any arrangements without Petyr’s help.

He’s here to keep you safe and desirable. No one wants to share a shelter with a filthy, starving girl. Those types of girls, the ones who have either given up or won’t give in, end up sitting slumped along the fence line and disappear overnight after a few days of missed meals and cold nights.

Some of them have the tattoos peeking out from fraying sleeves–the identifying mark the soldier looked for and didn’t find on Sansa. Jon said he wouldn’t do that to her, not even as he was being called off to the capital.

_Putting my SN on your arm isn’t how I’d want to announce to the world you were mine._

It’s only that the other ways don’t exist anymore.

When Petyr isn’t looking, Sansa shares her evening rations with the youngest of the girls, the ones for whom tattoos made no difference. She has to be careful about it. There’s always more food in his shelter, but he doesn’t like her to share what he’s given her freely.

Petyr says everyone has to work, and being new doesn’t buy girls even one night’s free shelter. Sansa is the exception. Petyr took her without payment into his shelter and shared his stockpile of extra rations and blankets with her. The rules are different for her. No one is to demand anything from her. He tells his fellow male prisoners that she’s his daughter and with her new identity comes a new name: Alayne. Women who know better are told to keep quiet. They must, because no one questions his claim.

It’s enough to keep the hungry stares of the men directed elsewhere. Petyr might only be former military like half a dozen other men in the camp, but he’s somebody who knows how to get what he wants, manipulating the exchanges that pass for law here. There is hardly a person in the camp that doesn’t imagine they’re in debt to him.

What is her accumulated debt after three weeks marked by neat stacks of silver, peel back ration tins? He says he knew her mother and that he was already working on finding Sansa, when he lost his leg. Even stripped of his military status, Petyr worked the government system, so that when the shelters were emptied out, Sansa ended up here, where he could take care of her.

Petyr’s work is very different from the the kind he sets up for the women. Petyr manages connections. Those connections could work to her advantage beyond the woven metal boundaries of the camp, where Jon doesn’t know she’s been scooped up out of the shelter he left her in.

She only makes the mistake of mentioning Jon once. She sees the fury in Petyr’s grey-green eyes, though he touches her arm with extra care, when he asks, “Who is this boy to you?”

There will be no help there. Petyr’s help extends only to keeping her trapped here. No one is going to put in a call to the capital to assure Officer Snow that Sansa Stark is safe and waiting. She’ll have to wait for him to find her in the registry, the way he did once before. Her name in that registry will have to be her salvation.

“A cousin,” she lies.

“I’m your family.”

He is consumed by the falsehood, insisting that she call him father even when they are alone. But Ned Stark was her father, and he named her after a distant cousin on his father’s side, long since deceased. She is not Alayne Stone.

“Who was Alayne?” she asks, peeling back the top of a ration tin that’s marked with the Red Cross symbol. These are the oldest rations, predating the collapse of non-government aid. Sometimes they’re spoiled. She sniffs at what might be chicken and rice congealed into one pasty colored mass.

“You are.”

“The soldiers have Alayne Stone on their registry lists like she’s a real person.” Clipboards in hand, fingers underlining the names of the girls they call out at roll call, the name’s existence there must mean someone before her was truly Alayne. Sansa wonders whether she was one of the girls along the fence line or whether she accepted someone’s so-called help. “And they never call out Sansa,” she adds, poking at the gel with her bent fork.

“Alayne is a real person now. I had to be thorough. Sansa Stark is gone. Deleted. You understand.”


	4. Chapter 4

Jon jams the stick shift into fourth, leaving Vale Elementary behind in a swirl of falling snowflakes. It isn’t a shelter anymore. The government repurposed the gym yet again. This time for military storage. Munitions and boxes of unopened rations replaced neat rows of cots, where he last saw Sansa, sitting primly, his sweater hanging a little loose around the neck.

He knew she wouldn’t be in the gym. When he was pulled off the front line after a six week stint, finding a government sanctioned computer terminal was his first priority. Just to check on her before he made his way south. Seeing ‘closed’ next to every women’s shelter in Sansa’s quadrant sent him back into the registry, his fingers repeatedly pressing the wrong keys as he tried to type her name into the slow search function.

 _No search items returned_.

A quick check of the death registry didn’t turn up anything either. The so called Corpse Counter is notoriously incomplete. People often die too quickly to be accounted for, can’t be identified when they’re found, or die under circumstances that soldiers aren’t willing to report.

Jon aims a fist at the dashboard, trying to start the Jeep’s heat back up with a punch. It’s fitfully gone in and out since he left the front line. At times the thing blares like a furnace, forcing him to strip down to his pants and crack the windows. Other times it rattles and blows cold. Before he stopped at the gym to look for information, his hands were so numb he couldn’t feel the steering wheel. Still beats being shot at by the UWR while your boots are sunk in three feet of snow. If Sansa was sitting in the seat next to him, he would even call it comfortable.

The skinny eighteen year old guard posted at Vale Elementary, who sneered at Jon until he got close enough for the kid to read his rank above his SN, said the girls got transferred to camps throughout the lower half of the quadrant. Jon saw a few men’s camps during inspections; he just hopes the women’s camps provide better shelter. If not, Sansa is dealing with far worse than a busted heater.

With the stoplights long ago disabled and no one on the road, it only takes ten minutes to get across town to the sector headquarters to refuel. The four wheel drive sucks gas like crazy. The snow is worse in the north but not by much. From what he heard at the front, the weather system is sinking south, ready to sock what’s left of the country in a long winter. The seasons don’t act like they did when he was kid thanks to global warming. The UWR justifies its violent takeovers, toppling governments in the name of a forced global warming initiative. They want to oversee the redistribution of all supplies, including what little is reaped from shortened growing seasons and dried up fields. It wouldn’t be a terrible idea if they didn’t brutally kill more than half a country’s population every time they rolled in or made kids half Jon’s height fight their battles.

He pulls up slow to the headquarters’ check-point, squinting out the passenger window at the collection of ratty trailers right beyond military housing. Sansa asked about the trailers. They aren’t the safe haven she hoped, but they are warm. Still, Theon dragged him inside one after they were all drafted, and Jon couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It’s no place for Sansa.

His fellow soldiers don’t give him trouble at the check-point or inner gate. No one enters his SN into their scanners before waving him through: everyone knows him here and respects his rank. There’s a dour faced kid named Tollett he knew from before, working the pump at the refueling station, who doesn’t bother with his scanner either. Not taking proper precautions at a fueling station could be suicide for a pump jockey.

Gas is as good as gold with the pipeline severed and no international oil coming in. Everything comes out of the Gulf, where pirates make it almost impossible for tankers to function like they should. After it manages to get here, no one wants to see one drop go astray.

Jon thumps a red plastic gas can in the back he wants filled too and tosses Tollett the keys, asking him to move the Jeep around to the west parking lot and leave it unlocked. The tall barbed wire fences and armed guards keep the unregistereds out, who might want to make away with a vehicle, and it’ll be quicker if he doesn’t have to go fetch back the key. He has no intention of staying here any longer than is strictly necessary.

What he needs is someone who can work a little tech magic. Jon’s good with a gun, decent in hand to hand, and has a knack for battle planning, but he hardly remembers the computing class he took at Winterfell Junior High and the government system is such a mess that whatever he learned probably wouldn’t be of any use anyway. There are guys here who used to pull stuff out of the government web that would have gotten them shot as traitors if Jon cared to report them. A little payback for his silence is in order.

Sam Tarly is exactly the kind of friendly techie he’s looking for, when he sticks his head around the terminal’s heavy mental door. They were in basic together. If Jon can call anyone a friend, it’s Sam.

“You got a minute, buddy?” Jon asks.

Sam looks up from his glowing computer station equipped with a two widescreens, a keyboard, and a plate of crackers and processed cheese that he probably isn’t allowed to have in here around the machines. Sam gives him that same stunned look as Tollett did, when Jon hopped out of the Jeep at the pump. They all expect him to be dead. Most people who are sent to the front don’t come back. They’re not winning the war.

“You’re back.”

“Just for a few.” They reassigned Jon to quadrant A, which means he’s AWOL. If any of the soldiers took the time to run his name through the system, there’d be an alert. They’d have cause to shoot him. “I need you to find someone for me in the registry,” he says, rounding the desk and slumping down into the empty chair at Sam’s side.

“Okay,” Sam says, pushing the plate of food across the desk towards Jon.

Jon grabs two cheese topped crackers and pops them both in his mouth. Sam probably could hear his stomach from the second he pushed through the door. He ran out of rations two days ago, since he was only given enough packs to last him until he arrived in quadrant A. He’ll need to grab more–enough for two–before heading out.

“Name’s Sansa Stark,” he supplies, reaching for a third cracker, as Sam pulls up the registry access hub. “Last I know she was at Vale Elementary.”

Sam won’t recognize the name, though he knew there was a girl Jon visited. Sam had a girl too: Gilly. Jon doesn’t know what the nature of the relationship was. Sometimes it’s better not to ask.

When half the population has nothing and slips further over the edge towards oblivion with every passing day and the other half has guns strapped to their hips, there’s an insurmountable imbalance between the two. Jon held all the power. He was a soldier, Sansa a civilian. He gave her food and protection. Giving freely with no strings attached didn’t erase the power difference. That imbalance kept his hands locked at her waist, when she pressed her lips to his, never shifting above or below where she was narrowest.

Sansa smiles and he feels lighter. She threads her fingers through his hair and his heart pounds. She’s gentle and brave and so beautiful. He would have fucked her on the bench seat of that RV–God knows he was hard enough, when she leaned into his side and slid her hand over his thigh–but what could he offer her in return? His SN inked on her pretty pink skin, stamping her as his property?

She’s a beautiful, vulnerable object. He won’t take advantage. He can’t be sure she didn’t kiss him only because of the imbalance. If the world hadn’t gone to hell, she probably would be as uninterested in him as she had been when they were kids.

Jon brushes at the crumbs that speckle his shirt. “I searched and couldn’t find her in a shelter or camp or the Corpse Counter.”

“The shelters are closed. They stuck the girls with the men.”

Jon coughs, as dry crackers and cheese sticks in his throat, bringing tears to his eyes. “They didn’t separate ‘em?” he croaks out.

“No, they’re not worried about that anymore.”

The men’s camps are in deplorable condition and they’re full of men. If that’s where she landed, she’s no better off than if he’d bought into one of the trailers with a few other guys.

Sam’s chair squeaks, when he shakes his head. “There’s no Sansa coming up here.”

“Can’t you do your thing?” Jon demands, kicking back from the desk, sending the wheeled desk chair rolling across the cracked tile floor.

“Hold on,” Sam says, as he pulls up a new blue screen. “You sure she was at Vale?”

“I stood right by her as they processed her.” Gripped his hand with a strength he didn’t know she had, and if he hadn’t been convinced the UWR needed to be stopped and he could be of help, he would have gone AWOL with her right there and then.

They still need to be stopped, but this government isn’t equipped to do it.

Sam points at the screen. “So this is the archived Vale records, which are due to be scrubbed. She’s not in them, which means she’s already been scrubbed. Someone deleted her from the entire system, all past records included.”

“Dead?”

“No, there’s no point in scrubbing the dead. She’s alive somewhere or was. Whoever did this could be in a heap of trouble, altering the registry like that. It’s illegal.”

“Is it reversible? Can you unscrub her or whatever.”

Sam’s eyes dart to the door. “This girl important to you, Jon?”


	5. Chapter 5

Slamming the door of his Jeep behind him, Jon’s boots crunch as they hit the melt and refreeze crust that overlays the gravel outside Camp 7B. An automatic check of his service weapon at his hip and he squares his shoulders, squinting at the guard standing at the gate. If he pulls his scanner, Jon’s not above sticking his gun in the messy looking soldier’s paunch. There’s a silencer attached to the muzzle if threat alone isn’t enough.

So long as the guards in the towers are asleep at the switch, Jon’s got enough ammo for whoever is hanging around the camp entrance thanks to the second weapon tucked into his waistband in line with his spine. He stripped it from the guard at a check-point 32 miles back, who decided Jon’s rank wasn’t enough to spare him a scan. His thoroughness was ended with a blow to the head that dropped him to the pavement. Jon’s willing to do a hell of a lot more.

His eyes scan the fence for additional black uniforms. The interior of the camp is mostly hidden, but he can smell it. Unwashed bodies, mud, sewage cutting through the cold. He abandoned her to this nightmare, when he thought he was doing his duty. Didn’t even look back, when he left her in that shelter, for fear he would lose his courage and go AWOL in front of more than a dozen witnesses.

“I’m here to see Director Hardyng,” Jon barks out, bringing the soldier at the gate to a slouched kind of attention.

Sam pulled the director’s name from the registry. Knowing his shit lends credibility and prevents people from pulling up his SN number, which gives Sansa a fighting chance and protects Sam too. His digital fingerprints are all over the searches that brought Jon to the last place Sansa Stark appeared in the system before being scrubbed in favor of an Alayne Stone. The changes to the registry happened with no more than a minute difference in the time-stamp.

_This Alayne girl could be anyone, Jon. Could be a total coincidence._

A reasonable warning, but Jon hasn’t felt reasonable in a long time. Anyone who tries to stop him from getting Sansa back will see how unreasonable he can be.

“Unlock the gate, soldier. Be quick about it.”

The man looks down at the scanner clipped to his belt, and Jon grabs the metal fencing and gives it a rattle, drawing his gaze back up. “You must be freezing your damn balls off.”

“Yeah, it’s cold.”

Could be a lot colder, but they’ll all know that kind of cold soon. “Happily shoot ’em off for you if you don’t hurry the fuck up.”

“Sorry, sir. Not many visitors. ’s unusual,” the man mumbles, as Jon’s fingers curl around the fence, watching the man search through keys on a heavy ring at his hip.

The third key he tries clicks in the giant padlock and Jon gives the gate a shove, freeing it from the groove it’s sunk in. The guard stumbles back to escape being hit, too distracted to stop Jon, when he heads for the slightly warped, plastic door that boasts a handwritten sign designating it the director’s office.

He doesn’t knock. No honorable man would play the little camp lord, set up in a heated tool shed, while men and women starve under his direction. These camp directors are all the same; Camp Director Hardyng doesn’t deserve his respect.

The door vibrates, when it hits the interior wall, but the man behind the metal desk isn’t a simpering lackey like the guard outside and he doesn’t flinch at the unexpected intrusion or Jon’s scowl. A big, ruddy hand brings a bottle up to his lips, and Hardyng watches Jon over the rim with a grin playing on his lips as he sips.

Where does someone even find a beer nowadays? He’s obviously well fed, well stocked, and there manages to be a sort of frat boy veneer to him that harsh reality has stripped from most men. There is something that sets him apart: he’s well connected. Better than most.

“On your feet, Director Hardyng.” Though Hardyng shifts his considerable heft in the rolling chair, he doesn’t obey. He’s accustomed to being in charge of this fiefdom, not having orders barked at him. “I need you to fetch a girl for me.”

“You want a pretty one, Officer…” The man’s eyes dart to Jon’s left breast, where his name, SN, and the ribbons above it mark him as an officer and a man who has seen action on the front. “Snow? Blonde, brunette? Something more exotic?”

A muscle by his eye jumps, twinging his fresh scar. He didn’t want Sansa in a trailer, didn’t want her flesh traded, but what is a mixed camp other than one giant trailer for male inmates and guards alike? “I’m here for one girl in particular.”

“Someone getting moved?” Hardyng asks, as he puts down his beer and lazily comes to his feet.

Jon crosses his arms over his chest. “Do I look like a transporter?”

The man smiles, calm in the face of Jon’s anger. “Can I get you a beer, while you wait?”

“Just my girl, thanks.”

“Oh,” Hardyng says, nodding as if they share a brotherhood beyond their uniform: the commodification of women. “What’s her name, Officer?”

“Alayne Stone.”

Sansa’s here. Jon knows it with gut twisting certainty the moment the director turns his back on him. He toys with a series of binders stacked on the tool shelf, hiding his face as he lies. “Name doesn’t ring any bells.”

Jon moves his hand to his hip, fingers at his belt just above his weapon, swallowing back the urge to pull the gun and put an end to this dance. He knows from experience there will be no satisfaction in it. Death is always a sorry business. Better to get out of here without tripping any alarms if possible. “I don’t want to find out she wandered off on your watch.”

“Nobody’s ever managed that.” Hardyng says, pulling out a binder. “I’ll just have a look in our records. Refresh my memory.” He lets the binder flop open on the desk and bends forward, slowly flipping pages with a spit moistened finger. “The paperwork part of this assignment isn’t really my specialty.”

Given the size of his arms, Jon can guess at what sorts of things Director Hardyng is built for.

Jon points at the December tab. “Try the fifteenth.”

There’s a reason Hardyng doesn’t want Jon to find Alayne’s name, a reason his fingers hover over the pages, partially obscuring Jon’s view. Jon would wager all the rations stashed in the back of his Jeep that Sansa’s name appears some weeks earlier, crossed out in the same block script. Hardyng played a part in this deception, benefited from it somehow, and if he hurt her, if he laid one finger on her, God help him. Justice is hard to come by, but Jon will deliver it to this camp.

“It’s your lucky day, Director,” Jon says, nudging away Hardyng’s hand to thump Alayne’s name on the page. “You didn’t lose an officer’s girl. A snafu like that could land you on the front.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing some action,” the man boasts, puffing out his chest as he straightens up to his full height. “Do my part.”

“I could still arrange that if she’s not in good shape.”

With tales of dirty bombs, UWR soldiers trained to take no captives, and forced sterilization all designed to drastically reduce population, even the most gun happy idiot raised on video game heroism dreads the front-lines. Hardyng moves with previously unseen quickness, his broad shoulders bumping into the doorway, as he leaves Jon alone in the shed.

Jon doesn’t know how long he’ll have. Probably a few minutes. Enough time that he could make quick work of the place: sift through the binders, dig through the drawers, looking for evidence or supplies. But the Jeep is gassed up and stocked with rations, he’ll give his second weapon to Sansa or the knife in his boot if she prefers, and Jon knows enough already.

The rot in the government goes right to the top. The president, the council, the generals. There is no hope in their leadership, which is why Jon’s plans take them south. All he needs is Sansa, and then they can focus on whatever future there is to salvage under a different oath of allegiance.

He sees a sliver of her through the door Hardyng left hanging open–red hair pulled back tight and wearing a military jacket with the name ripped off at the breast, small enough that it actually fits. Hardyng has her by the elbow, but she shakes free of him, as their eyes meet. She trips and Jon catches her, as she stumbles over the plastic threshold into his arms. Hauling her upright, he buries his face in her neck, breathing her in. She smells like the same cheap soap they issue soldiers, but underneath there’s the sweet tang he’s only tasted on her neck.

Her voice wavers on his name, fingers scrambling against his jacket as she rises up on her toes, and he squeezes harder, drawing her in tight. If he could keep her folded up in his chest, where his heart hammers away at his ribs the same way it does in a fire fight, he would. Keep her safe from this ugly, god forsaken world.

“This the one?” Hardyng asks, chuckling to himself.

They’re making a scene. Soldiers don’t typically go to pieces over a girl, but it feels as if the breath has been knocked out of Jon, making his knees watery and his pulse too quick.

Jon pulls back and tips her head up, ignoring the son of a bitch’s toothy grin. “You alright?”

She’s got a smudge on her chin and her cheeks have thinned out, but she’s in better shape than he hoped. He’s not sure whether to be relieved or worried that she looks like someone’s special pet.

“I told them I was yours.” She tosses a quick look over her shoulder. “They wouldn’t believe me.”

“Is that right?”

Hardyng clears his throat. “A misunderstanding. A lot of these girls are liars, and she isn’t inked.”

Jon slides his arm around Sansa’s shoulder, turning her around. “Would you blemish something this beautiful?”

“Somethings just too pretty,” Hardyng agrees, though puzzled lines knit his brow. “That’s why she’s in the good shape you see here.”

How is Jon going to ask Sansa if there are marks he can’t see? What right does he have to pry open her secrets, when he left her? What good will it do if she spills them, when they have no choice but to leave her tormentors unpunished?

“I’ll send my recommend to General Lannister. Let him know what a good job you’re doing here, Director Hardyng. See about replenishing that beer supply for you too.”

“I appreciate that. And anything else I can help you with before you go? Could borrow my quarters for an hour or so if you like,” he says, jerking his thumb towards the east.

Jon exhales hard through his nose, forcing his face into stern neutrality at the man’s offer of a place to fuck Sansa. “Not necessary. You might tell your guard out front to sharpen up though. I’d lash a man for disgracing the uniform like that.”

Another officer would, the kind of officer Jon needs Hardyng to believe him to be, so the director doesn’t pull out a scanner the minute they put the camp in the rear-view.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, good,” Jon says, dragging Sansa through the doorway.

She tenses for the first time ever under his touch, as he lets her body bounce carelessly against the frame. If her pale skin wasn’t already marked with bluish bruises beneath the jacket and muddy pants, it will be now. This is how men treat the girls they stash in trailers. Should feel familiar to Hardyng.

It must be a convincing enough display. As they put the director behind them and stride towards the gate, Sansa’s steps a hiccup slower than his own, the guard doesn’t hesitate to pull it open for them and her eyes cut to Jon’s widened in unmasked alarm.

They’re only a few feet from the Jeep, when he can risk it, lowering his voice so no one will hear his promise. “You’re safe with me now.”


	6. Chapter 6

Passing through quadrant B into C, there were no pop up check-points along the highway. It’s been good for Jon and Sansa, but a bad sign for those they leave behind. Things aren’t going well at the front if they’ve pulled all personnel from C quad. Sector headquarters right off the highway looked deserted, though Jon didn’t slow down to investigate. No guards meant no one to scan Jon’s SN or ask nosy questioned about an uninked girl riding with an officer across quadrant lines. No one to kill either. Jon would rather not add shooting some guard point blank in front of her to what Sansa’s had to endure.

All she’s done is sleep. Despite the Jeep’s bad shocks and the heater refusing to kick on no matter how many times he hits the dash with his fist. He waited until she nodded off, her head tipped back and mouth hanging slightly open, to drape his jacket over her. He couldn’t stand to see how pale her hands looked tucked in around her chest, but couldn’t bring himself to touch her the way he wanted to when she was awake either. Even if it was just to cover her up. Doesn’t feel right. Feels more wrong than it ever did in her RV.

They weren’t two blocks from the camp, when she asked whether they could get his number tattooed on her arm.

_I’m AWOL. My number is a death warrant._

If they can get across the border, she won’t need a tattoo.

South of the border, there’s a different kind of invasion taking place. Southern propaganda found its way into the barracks on occasion, identifiable by the red Asian dragon that curls along the edges of all their material. Most of the men took no interest in the Targaryen promises—gender, social, and economic equality based on sharing resources and responsible consumption—since the soldiers benefit the most from the existing regime. They don’t understand that their regime will be the death of all of them. No telling whether the propaganda’s claims are 100 percent true, but if they are, everyone in this godforsaken country better pray the so-called Targaryen Cartel is successful in their liberation efforts.

Without any blocked roads or a blown out tire sacrificed to highways devastated by years of slashed maintenance budgets, it’s a 19 hour drive to the Mexican border. By the time they’re in Texas, he wonders if she’ll sleep the whole way. He keeps looking sideways at Sansa, convinced she’s been shaken awake by a last second attempt to miss being swallowed by a nasty gash in the road, but not even the harsh swings of the vehicle disturb her.

Guys coming off the front sometimes sleep like this. Like the dead.

He’d let her sleep forever if he could safely leave her in the Jeep. But he can’t. They’re not far from Laredo, and she needs to know the plan and he needs to relieve himself. He takes an exit where there’s a sign for a Walmart. There’s a chance, a slim one, that there could be something worthwhile in the wreck of that store. Most of the big box stores were picked clean years back, as corporation after corporation folded and people smashed windows and broke down doors before CEOs could move in teams to liquidate the remaining goods.

There are guides, Mexican citizens, who help people cross the well guarded border at a steep price. With the dollar worth more as kindling than currency, it’s the trade of flesh and goods that greases palms. If he didn’t have the back of the Jeep packed with rations and gas—there should be some left, when they get to Laredo, especially since he’s been able to take the Jeep out of four wheel drive as they travelled farther south—he’d chance digging through the Walmart for something that could give them more bargaining power. But it isn’t worth it.

He pulls over the overpass and a little beyond, close enough to the highway that he can get back on quick, but mostly tucked out of sight. Quad C might seem deserted, but there are bound to be people this close to the Mexican border. Men mostly. Sometimes hanging out in gangs. Pulling over could mean getting discovered by unregistereds or a military patrol. Jon banks on the fact that no one will spot them behind the windbreak of scrubby brush.

He needs to show her how to protect herself. In case they’re so unlucky as to be found by someone or something happens to him.

He watches her for a minute, letting the engine hum, wasting precious fuel, while he works up the nerve to touch her. She jerks and blinks twice, as he pulls his hand back from her shoulder and switches off the engine, giving her a moment to find her bearings.

“I gotta step outside for a minute,” he tells her. He makes her choose which one he wants before he opens the door—knife or gun.

“I don’t want anyone to get close enough to use a knife,” she says, taking the gun from him with steadier hands than Jon expected.

When he’s zipped himself back up, he walks around to her side of the Jeep, pops the door, and motions for her to step down. She’s put the gun he gave her on the dash and he grabs it for her, putting it back in her hand. He makes sure she knows how to use it, though she insists it isn’t necessary, since she used to watch her brothers shoot clay pigeons at their place in the country.

“It’s different shooting someone,” he says, his hand at her elbow, straightening her arm. It’s the closest they’ve been since he held her in the camp director’s office, but the fact that he’s showing her how to kill someone only leaves him feeling detached.

This isn’t what he wants for her.

Her effect is completely flat, when she asks, “Who am I going to shoot?”

“No one once we get across the border.”

“Mexico?” She lowers the gun. “They closed their border.”

They had to. The stream of refugees from California when the water ran out was enough to overwhelm Mexican authorities at a time when every nation was struggling to provide for its people.

“I’ve got an illegals map. There are people who can get us across.”

“Both of us?”

“Both of us,” he promises. No more separations.

Sansa offers to drive, but she doesn’t drive shift. It’s for the best. He doesn’t want to run the risk of coming across a check-point with Sansa at the wheel. It would look suspicious. No soldier would let a girl get behind the wheel of a government vehicle.

Approaching Laredo, his eyes feel like they’ve got road grit in them, they’re so dry from staring too long at the endless highway, and if it wasn’t for Sansa’s humming, he probably would have fallen asleep at the wheel about an hour back. Adrenaline is the only thing keeping him upright. It would be impossible to stop and rest now, knowing how close they are to crossing.

The old map Jon has messily folded on the console is marked with a black X in the southern portion of what used to be Laredo. Sam gave it to him. Even if Jon wasn’t AWOL, having this map on him would be enough to get him executed. The spot marks an illegal crossing point, a place to secure crossing with a Mexican guide. Jon doesn’t know how up to date it is. Whoever ran this illegal crossing could be long dead or serving time in a Mexican prison.

At least there are signs as they drive south along US 83 that this route is better traveled than the others they’ve been on. Despite the condition of the city itself, which suffered the same lawlessness and economic turmoil other southwestern cities experienced once cut off from trade to the south, the road is patched. Someone has maintained this stretch of road. Maybe the people running the crossing. Although most people crossing the border would be coming on foot and wouldn’t require a well paved highway.

It sets them apart. It should be enough—a back seat packed with supplies and a fueled up Jeep—but the blond bearded, hulk of a man looking over their supplies and kicking the tires of the Jeep acts like they’re trying to sell him a bill of goods. He keeps looking sideways at Sansa too, as if she might be part of the package.

“You’re a Mexican citizen?” Jon asks, pulling Sansa in close to his hip.

“Si, amigo.”

Jon knows better than to believe him, but what matters isn’t the man’s citizenship. All that counts is whether he can deliver them into Mexico, and the guy’s got the false papers they need and the metal boat to get them across the river. It’s more than they had prior to meeting him.

They’ve already shaken on it and left their Jeep and all their supplies a couple of blocks back by a trailer, where it’s probably being divided up among the crew behind this operation, but Jon pauses, when they emerge from the dry brush along the bank of the river, wondering whether he’s done the right thing. The papers could be worthless and from what he can make out in the dwindling light of dusk, the Rio Grande doesn’t seem terribly deep or fast. It’s not cold enough this far south that a swim would absolutely kill them. High 50s maybe. Jon could still pull his weapon and tell the guy the deal’s off, peace out and cross a little further south on their own without this guy leering at Sansa every time Jon lets his arm drop from around her.

The guy looks up from the boat, where he’s arranging the paddles. “I can hear you thinking, amigo. Like a squeaky wheel. Let me warn you though. A swim in this river will kill ya.”

“That right?”

“Raw sewage. Tons of it.”

Sansa wrinkles her nose. It explains the smell and the dead fish that dot the river’s edge in various states of decomposition.

The guy pats the wooden bench in front of him. “Time’s a wasting. You in or out?”

There are no bridges, pedestrian, rail, or otherwise. The Mexican government took them out, cutting off all international entryways from the US and up went the guard towers, spaced evenly across the length of the border. Dusk is a good time, their guide assured them: low light and at the end of the shift, guaranteeing worn out guards, who won’t be as eagle eyed as at the start of their shift. He swears he knows the sweet spot between the towers, far enough away that they’ll be no more than a bit of flotsam on the chocolate brown water.

Sansa looks up at Jon and bobs her head yes.

“One in front, one in back,” their guide instructs, having situated himself in the middle, where the paddles rest.

Jon holds on to Sansa’s arm, balancing her as she climbs into the back and settles gingerly with her legs twisted to the side to avoid the guy’s bulk in front of her.

“You good?” Jon asks her, his eyes flicking to her middle. Her gun is tucked in her waistband, hidden by the heavy knit of her shirt and the men’s jacket she wears over it.

“Little lady is fine. Give us a shove, amigo.”

Her hand shifts against her thigh, moving higher towards the gun. She understands. They both have to be on guard, even though this guy wants to play tour guide, as Jon toes the boat with his boot and clambers in before the boat bobs too far out of reach.

“Didn’t use to be so deep,” the man says, as the bottom of the boat catches in the current and he dips the paddles into the water. “’bout dried up there at the end.”

The boat rocks and Sansa’s left hand darts out to grab the edge, her knuckles going white as her fingers wrap around it.

“Flows like God intended,” he continues, unbothered by the roll of the boat, “ever since they blew the dams up north. Nothing holding back the water now.”

It happened all over the southwest. One dam after another was blown by hooded terrorists. Reservoirs were sabotaged too. The work of Dooms Day cults that sprang up as the global situation began to deteriorate, who were trying to hasten the End of Days through acts of destruction. That’s what the state told them. That was the nightly news story for months. Jon believed it at the time.

Now he suspects it was the US government. With a water shortage crippling the west, it was easier to destroy the containment systems and force people east, where they could be gathered into a smaller territory and be more closely monitored. For a safer tomorrow.

Something thumps against the boat, vibrating through Jon, and their guide chuckles. “Dog,” he announces, peering over. “River is chock full of ’em. Sometimes gringos too. Folks who weren’t as smart as you two.”

Jon doesn’t feel particularly smart. The guy has huge muscles and a wide back, plenty of heft to get them across the river, and yet, they’re barely moving. He’s isn’t exactly working to get them there with any speed.

“Or as well fixed, huh? You must be an important  _oficial_ , amigo.”

Jon turned his jacket inside out before they got out of the Jeep, so his name doesn’t show. “I’m nobody.”

The man’s mouth pulls up on one side. “A good thief then.”

Sansa’s been squinting, tilting her head to see around their guide, searching for the other shore, while he babbles. Jon can tell before she ever speaks up that she wants to be finished with this ride. “Have they ever stopped you on the Mexican side?”

“Me?” The guy stops pulling and they float, drifting along with the current in the deepest part of the river. The dirty, stinking water ripples where the paddles trail, slowing them down rather than speeding them towards the other side. “I got an arrangement. The goods are delivered right into my hands and I pass them along. Don’t ever have to worry about the border.”

Something is off about the way they continue to drift, while the man stares blandly at Jon. Regardless of good timing and distance from the closest guard tower, the less time they spend on this river exposed the better. This guy is stupid or he has no reason to hurry. Doesn’t bode well either way.

Jon raises his brows, indicating the paddles with a nod. “You need help with those?”

“You deaf,  _oficial_?” the man says, lowering his voice as he leans forward. “I don’t worry about the border.”

He smiles at Jon, all gap-toothed and threatening, and the world tilts. The boat lurches to the left. Sansa screams sharp and quick. The downward swing of the boat nearly throws Jon from the boat, and he tenses, waiting for the rush of cold water. They don’t tip quite far enough to make it a reality and his hand slams into the side at the nadir of their arc. His fingers slide down the damp metal surface. They rock violently, the left side already rocking back out of the water before he can find a handhold. Jon’s leg shoots out to stop him from sliding off the bench into the slap of the water that rushes up on his right. A spray of water makes Jon’s eyes snap shut, but he opens them again, as his boot jams into the side of the boat, preventing his body from being carried over the side by his own momentum.

It’s dark and the world feels upside down, but he catches sight of Sansa’s hand, still holding on, as something hard hits him under the chin, knocking him back. This time he gets both hands to close around the rim of the boat, and he avoids toppling backwards over the prow.

He blinks hard, clearing his woozy vision. All he can make out is the dark outline of the guy he’s given all his worldly goods to, looming between him and Sansa. Their guide is trying to kill him. Jon grabs for the gun on his hip, but the boat is still rocking and he goes to his elbow on the bench as soon as he lets go. The guy hits him again, a jab to the throat with something hard enough to bruise. The paddle, Jon realizes, as he arches his back, trying to gain an inch from its rough, wet edge.

“Over you go, amigo. I only need your little lady.”

Sansa’s the goods.

Jon opens his mouth to bargain or threaten or tell him to go straight to hell, but he’s jabbed once more and he sputters uncontrollably.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky. Just don’t swallow…”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish his warning. A crack cuts through the night and red blooms on their guide’s throat, bubbling and bright. The paddle dips, and Jon grabs it, as the guide slumps forward, gurgling.

He can finally see her. The gun is extended, held out straight in front of her like he showed her. With the man flopped over, the gun is pointed right at Jon, quivering with the force of her shaking arms. He reaches across the noisily dying man, his hand held palm out. “Sansa,” he says, as his hand closes around her wrist. He feels the fight go out of her and he forces her arm down.

“Push him over, push him over,” Sansa says so quickly the words slur together in a hiss.

He told her she wouldn’t have to shoot anyone.

“Push him over,” she repeats, her eyes fixed on the back of the man’s head, as he takes the gun and puts the safety back on.

A dog barks on the US side of the border and a flicker of light illuminates the shore. The gunshot has drawn attention.

He tucks her gun alongside his own.

“No time,” he grunts.

The other paddle is trapped between the man’s chest and thighs, and Jon nearly sends them into the water as he grapples to free it. Eyes wide and arms wrapped around herself, Sansa doesn’t move to help, but she’s the only reason they still have a shot at escape.

“Will the guards have heard?”

“No,” he lies.

Hopefully border patrol is accustomed to hearing gunshots from the US side. Hopefully that’s business as usual and they’re not about to be lit up by a searchlight.

Jon doesn’t have any practice rowing and for the first few pulls they don’t do anything but float ever closer to the guard tower Jon knows is there but can’t make out in the darkness, when he glances over his shoulder. Finally he gets the angle right on the paddles and they make progress towards the Mexican shore.

Twice she asks, “Is he dead?” before the boat hits bottom with a thud, but he isn’t sure enough to give her an answer.

She flinches, when he forces the guy onto his side, so he can dig in the man’s pockets for the papers they need. They luck out that they’re not stained in blood. There’s blood everywhere, puddling around the guy’s feet, soaking his white tennis shoes.

“He bled out,” Jon says, tucking the papers into his jacket and holding a hand out to Sansa. “We got to hurry.”

By the time they’ve pushed through the scrub that leads down to the river and found a dirt road to follow under the moonless sky, Jon’s muscles burn, cramped by exhaustion and panic. Despite Sansa’ breath coming so fast that it sounds like each step she takes will be her last, she’s quick and he doesn’t have to slow his stride to match hers. Hand in hand, they skirt a highway, keeping out of sight. Twice Jon tugs her behind a building, pressing his brow to hers until a truck has passed, but other than silhouetted figures moving behind drawn curtains, they don’t see anyone along the mostly deserted roads.

The last Jon heard, General Targaryen had established a beachhead along the coastline to the south, a base of operations to launch her full scale invasion of the Americas. That’s where they’ve got to head, but after an hour of racing over uneven roads in the dark, Sansa sags against his side, tripping over her own feet. He’ll have to carry her soon, and he doesn’t have it in him. There’s no way they can go any further tonight.

At the edge of a trash littered rail line, they happen upon a tumbled down stone building. It looks like it could have been owned by the railroad at some point, but it’s useless to anyone but vagrants now. Only three walls are left, all blackened at the top from a fire that must have happened years ago, and the roof is burned away, but it’ll provide some shelter and shield them from prying eyes. Weapon drawn, he inspects it with Sansa clinging to his waist. It’s empty. It’ll do.

They sprawl over the dusty concrete floor, letting one of the remaining walls hold them up. Both guns laid out to his right within reach, loaded and ready, he stretches his legs out, wincing.

“Sleep.” It’s a command as much for his whirring brain as an invitation for her to relax against him.

She accepts without hesitation, curling into his side, pressing into him with her head pillowed against his shoulder. Her breath puffs against the exposed skin of his neck and he loops an arm around her waist, scooting her in close.

“I almost lost you.”

Almost. He doesn’t know how she got her gun out much less aimed it. “You’re a good shot.” With the roll of the boat, it’s a wonder she didn’t shoot him instead. He clears his throat and immediately regrets it. The blow to his windpipe and the dust he inhaled on the road did a number on his throat. “You weren’t kidding about not needing practice.”

Her hand snakes under his shirt, where it’s come untucked, sliding over the flat of his stomach and around his ribs. Her fingers are cool and his skin pebbles. His whole body twitches awake in spite of his near terminal level of exhaustion. She has that effect. Even on the worst days, he felt better, when he visited her RV, sipping on a glass of water and watching her eat his rations.

Jon laces his fingers in her hair, palming the base of her head. Fuck, she feels good. He forgot what it felt like to hold her, to feel her chest expand against his.

“I was aiming for his head.”

He smiles into her hair. The last time he smiled must have been in her RV months ago. “Close enough.”

He can’t hold onto the feeling of relief, as regret creeps in. They’re not dead, but he still managed to let Sansa down. “It should have been the other way around. I wanted to protect you from that.” The faces of the men he’s shot already flicker before his eyes in his dreams. One more wouldn’t have weighed him down much more. He didn’t want that stain on her soul. “You okay?”

It’s a stupid question. She’s not okay. She shot someone. They about took an unplanned dip in the Rio Grande, which apparently would have killed them. He’s not okay either. Their so called guide tried to kill him and take Sansa. His best friend is dead, most of his friends are dead, Sansa lost her parents, and there’s a good chance all her brothers and her little sister are dead. If he stops to think about how not okay the last few years have been, he’ll go crazy. He’ll fucking lose it.

She pulls her hand out from underneath his shirt and drapes it around his neck. “Jon, I need you.”

“I’m here. Sleep, honey.”

“No, I need you,” she repeats, hauling herself into his lap in a huff that brings her squarely against him, one long leg bent on either side of his body. He breathes in through his nose at the heat of her pressed against him.

He’s not a saint. He thought of the time she suggested they fuck—in more euphemistic, sweetly outdated terms—and sometimes in his head he responds differently to the offer. When he lets his mind wander, he does more than kiss her. He’s careful. Makes her gentle words seem only fitting for what they do. He maps every inch of her, places he’s never seen on her, with reverent hands.

Even if he never gets to touch her like that, he’s seen enough to know she’s the loveliest thing in this world. He brushes her hair back to get a better look at her in the shadow of this building’s shell. She’s beautiful even with circles under her eyes and dry cracked lips. And so damn brave.

“Jon, I trust you.”

A lot of good that did her. That guide was going to sell her. Jon almost delivered her right into the hands of someone trading in flesh at the border, feeding on people’s desperation to get across.

“You don’t owe me anything.” His hand slides down her back, pulling her firmly against him to increase the tempting weight of her, his body and his words working at cross purposes.

“An exchange,” she says, giving his shoulders a shove that jars his bones against the stone. “Does it have to be about debt?” Her nails dig in through the stiff fabric of his jacket. “Doesn’t anybody love anybody anymore?”

He kisses her. Bites her. Too hard. Carries her down to the hard floor with a hand beneath her head and works her pants off with one hand. The night air is crisp, but she’s warm and wet and he curses as many times as he tells her he loves her as their hips meet and she arches up into him.

He loves her and he’s going to keep her safe and make her come a million times before their last day on this planet. It feels possible. She tastes of blood and salt and her skin is softer than it has any reason to be, but she feels strong moving against him, her hands grasping his side, and he feels stronger for her. They’ll find the Targaryen Cartel. He’ll see her to safety. He’ll fight to save what’s left of their world. He makes a half dozen panted promises against her ear, as she gasps and shudders underneath him, and he has one stray thought left that reminds him to pull out of her before he comes.

This shitty world is short on condoms. He should have checked that Walmart.

They lie back, staring up at the cloudy sky overhead. In his drowsy, drained state, he doesn’t register for God knows how long the play of her fingers over his hand, twisting his service ring around and around.

Married to the military. Property of the state. It takes some tugging, but he gets the thing off. Looks through it, the empty space inside. It’s too big for her. Scuffed from wear. No one would mistake it for anything but an ugly service ring. “It’s all I got,” he says, rubbing its edge over the ridge of her knuckles. No point in promising something better, when there’s nothing better out there.

She twists, angling her head to look at him. “Your service ring? You want me to wear it?”

Jon swallows. “You don’t have to.”

She slips it on her thumb, the only finger it will stay on. It looks different on her, bulky and starkly masculine on her slim finger, but he doesn’t hate it, the way he did on himself. Not when it means something different. He feels the sharp edge of it, when she lifts her hand to his face and asks, “What does that make me?”

“It makes me yours.”


End file.
